by regular contributor Brian Hoover

I got a cryptic e-mail from a college friend the other day saying he wanted to talk. We didn’t really have a talk-on-the-phone kind of friendship, so I wrote him back and told him to give me a call. After catching each other up on our day-to-day stuff, he finally told me why he wanted to get in touch.

As a first-time father of a eighteen-month-old, I’ve been on the advice-seeking end of this kind of conversation more than the advice-dispensing (I can talk a decent game, but I’m as clueless as anyone). But my friend’s question had less to do with any specific act of fatherhood than it did a common but chiefly modern concern: When is the best time to start a family?

Once upon a time, it seems, this question was a nonfactor in our cultural experience. The best time to start a family followed hard upon exchanging vows: You got married, you had kids, you lived in happy pursuit of the American Dream ever after. There are many more paths to parenthood now that we have begun to recognize that the capacity to raise kids does not sit squarely with the white bread nuclear model of generations past.

We have more freedom now to plan our families than we’ve ever had before. With more control over our reproductive destiny, in terms of conception and contraception alike, we can wait until that ultimate state of Readiness arrives. We can wait until we’ve finished that graduate degree, wait until we’ve ditched town for a lawn in the ’burbs. We can wait until our careers are on bedrock and there’s money to burn in the bank. The inclination to say, “We’ll wait to start a family until we’re totally ready” is easy to understand. It’s what my wife and I did; we knew we wanted to expand our family some day, but that some day wasn’t even discussed until we were five years in.

At that point, she and I were 30 and 29, respectively. My wife had finished her master’s and ascended to the chair of her department at school; I had worked my way into the stage actors’ union and had steady income from a variety of performing and teaching gigs. We owned a home—not the house on the cul-de-sac of our wildest fancy, but a decent condo in a respectable school district. We’d scratched out a little bit of a savings, somehow. We were in a good place. We were Ready.

So we decided to go live without a net, so to speak. And it was good. We got pregnancy tests, and when they didn’t show us little blue plusses or whatever they were supposed to do, we kept at it. And it was good. Maybe a little more like work than we’d expected, but good all the same.

All around us, our friends were growing their families. The wedding boom we’d experienced post-college segued into a baby shower boom. We held our old roommates’ infants and imagined what our own would look like, hoping that it would happen for us soon so our kids could all grow up together. Some of our friends were getting pregnant with their seconds, and we remained the couple with the spoiled cat. We started to wonder about ourselves. Was she barren? Was I sterile? Had we screwed up the process by our chemical meddling? Or had we just waited too long after all?

We believed we were Ready, but we hadn’t accounted for difficulties conceiving. We hadn’t accounted for miscarriage once we did conceive. So we took stock, decided to be less aggressive in our pursuit, to let come what may. For every story about the couple who’d gotten pregnant as soon as they’d started trying, there was one about the couple who’d had no luck. Usually, the tales had it, they’d try and try, become stressed and obsessed, and it was only when they eased up or even gave up that they magically conceived. Perhaps that would be our story.

It wasn’t. We fell into a more natural rhythm, and we stayed as childless as we’d always been. We considered getting ourselves tested. We considered alternative fertilization methods, we considered adoption. We considered whether this was all a sign that the Universe had good reason to deprive us of offspring and that we ought not to push it if we had any sense of what was good for us.

When the housing market tanked, we were saddled with a mortgage far in excess of what our condo was worth; our savings meant a lot less in light of that. Acting work was harder to get, and the teaching was starting to wear me down. The future at large started to feel as infertile as the present and so, a bit restless, I applied and was accepted to grad school. It would be a rough couple of years and there would be lots of loans to repay, but we’d survived my wife’s grad days and we’d survive mine. The Readiness of a year or two before had been almost completely compromised, but it was all in the spirit of letting come what may.

We found out we were pregnant just exactly as all this was going on. Obviously.

And so I told my friend, in reply to his question about when’s a good time to start a family, that there is no such earthly thing. You can be Ready, and nature could have other plans. You could be completely Unready, and then it happens. Strike that: No matter when it happens, you will be Unready. The simple fact of the matter is that there is no amount of preparing you can do that will ever adequately equip you for the indescribable extremes of parenting. You are charged with making sure this tiny, helpless thing survives, because without you, it cannot. You love this tiny, helpless thing more than you thought yourself capable, even though it pukes and cries and never lets you get three hours of sleep and lays utter waste to your social life. At 3:30 in the morning, when your infant has a high fever or an erupting incisor, you’re not so much going to care about your 401(k) or how many more payments you have on your Nissan as you will about tending to this tiny, helpless thing so that everybody can get some rest.

Get your ducks in a row, if you like, or don’t—it doesn’t matter. There’s no such thing as the perfect time to start a family. No matter when you decide to start a family, parenthood is going to be the most glorious and god-awful hardest job you’ve ever had, and it will take precedence over everything else. You will do what you have to in order to ensure survival, The End.

I asked my friend on the phone several times, “Am I making any sense?” He assured me I was, but I’m not sure I agree. I talked in circles for forty minutes and I couldn’t seem to put my finger on the right thing to tell him about when to have a family. Frankly, I was worried that I was scaring the shit out of him.

When I told my wife later on about the conversation, she was able to distill it in a way that I couldn’t. “The only requirement for starting a family,” she said, “is wanting to have a family. Everything else will work itself out.”  She didn’t mean that you’ll have to do nothing. No, sir. But if you want to have a family, have a family. There will always be challenges—financial, reproductive, you name it—and you will have a lot of figuring to do along the way.

Just know that Ready is a myth.